The Atlas of New Librarianship [Paperback]

[T]he text covers such a vast array of pertinent subjects that almost any reader…may find a few topics of personal interest.

Our profession's Finnegans Wake.

Deep thinking, beyond brands, down to the core concepts and competencies that define librarianship. Lankes creates thoroughly described verbal and visual explanations of the relationships between the many disparate parts that make up our professional whole.

The Atlas is not a book; it is a manifesto, a set of principles and convictions aimed at shaking new life and belief into a field that too often fears for its own future. Read it and be prepared to act.

An essential guide to a librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning.

Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. He describes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning; and he suggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities. To help librarians navigate l£P